Global Citizenship, Cultural Citizenship and World Religions in Religion Education

Global Citizenship, Cultural Citizenship and World Religions in Religion Education David Chidester HSRC Publishers Occasional Paper Series, Number 1 Series Editor: Dr Wilmot James, Executive Director: Social Cohesion and Integration, Human Sciences Research Council Published by the Human Sciences Research Council Publishers Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, South Africa © Human Sciences Research Council First published 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. ISSN: 1684–2839 Produced by comPress Distributed in South Africa by Blue Weaver Marketing and Distribution, P.O. Box 30370, Tokai, Cape Town, South Africa, 7966. Tel/Fax: (021) 701-7302, email: blueweav@mweb.co.za About the Author David Chidester is a Visiting Fellow at the Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme of the HSRC. He is Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Cape Town, Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA), and Co-Director of the International Human Rights Exchange. He is author or editor of fifteen books in the study of religion, including Religions of South Africa (1992), Shots in the Streets: Violence and Religion in South Africa (1992), Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (1996), and Christianity: A Global History (2000). III Global Citizenship, Cultural Citizenship and World Religions in Religion Education David Chidester Why study religion and religions? Why should we be involved as educators, students, parents or administrators in the process of teaching and learning about religious diversity? In this essay, I want to test one possible answer: citizenship. As I hope to show, the validity of this answer depends less upon what we mean by religion than it does upon what we mean by citizenship, although both terms will have to be brought into focus. Without exhausting all possible avenues of exploration, at the very least I hope to suggest that the study of religion, religions and religious diversity can usefully be brought into conversation with recent research on new formations of citizenship. Conventionally, the modern notion of citizenship has combined political-legal rights and responsibilities with symbolic-affective loyalties and values into a public status of full inclusion and partici-pation within a society. Located within the constitutional frame-works of modern states, social citizenship has generally been defined as national citizenship. Although the second half of the twentieth century certainly produced declarations of transnational rights and social movements with transnational loyalties, social citizenship formally remained national citizenship. According to many analysts, however, the increasing scope and pace of globalisation since the 1990s has generated new forms of ‘post-national citizenship’, which 1 ... - tailieumienphi.vn